The tide has been turning in terms of companies’ political leanings for a while now, but the reelection of Trump really brought people’s opinions to the fore. The presence of almost every major tech CEO at Donald Trump’s inauguration was an early indicator that social media bosses aimed to be more visible and invested in American politics than ever before—presaging some serious changes in many of the biggest social media sites
While this is far from exclusive to social media companies, they do exist in a unique context. The decision by both Meta and X to reduce content moderation is a riposte to growing scrutiny from governments and political bodies, most notably the EU. With these companies emboldened by Trump and a shift in online discourse, what does the future look like—and is there a genuine risk that social media sites could be banned in the UK and EU?
A ticking clock
It’s a chronically overused word, but this really has been an unprecedented couple of years for social media. If you can remember as far back as the last US election, it was TikTok that was under fire.
When the Biden administration set a deadline to ban the platform in the US unless it was sold to a US business, there was a real threat that one of the most popular social media networks in the world would become inaccessible to hundreds of millions of people.
This wasn’t just petty political squabbling. The prospective ban was a result of genuine national security concerns. The Chinese government has a stake in owner ByteDance, and could potentially have accessed the data of millions of US citizens. Low end estimates as of 2026 put the number of American TikTok users at 136 million, with the upper end being around half of the US population.
This wasn’t new: the previous Trump administration had threatened the same thing during his trade war with China. Yet when he returned to power, he opted to delay the decision.
Amazingly, this was positioned by TikTok itself as Trump ‘saving TikTok’ in a message on the platform, after it returned from a one-day outage in the US—a far from subtle bid to win the new president’s favour, and to set the narrative for TikTok’s users. It took until January of this year for TikTok to finalise a sale of its US arm—along with a hefty $10 billion payment to the Trump administration.
Facing facts
National security concerns are one thing. When it comes to other social media networks, though, the aims and ambitions of their leaders seem much less opaque.
The changes to X (née Twitter) under the leadership of Elon Musk have been well-documented: complaints range from the platform becoming more toxic due to lower moderation standards; to the unbanning of controversial figures like Tommy Robinson; to the extension of ‘verified’ checkmarks to anyone who wishes to pay for them.
Perhaps the most direct intervention, though, has come from Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg. Reflecting directly on the Trump election and changing political landscape, Zuckerberg announced an immediate change to Facebook’s content moderation policies.
Moderation would be drastically decreased, with a pledge to undertake less fact-checking and block less content, including extreme political views and a range of insulting and derogatory terms. This includes language which might be considered hate speech in many countries, including misogynistic and gender critical language, such as deliberately misgendering transgender people, or referring to women as objects or ‘it’.
Making sense of current social media
So where does this shift in attitudes come from? The obvious answer would be that these business leaders feel more empowered to express their true ideologies under a new government, with the evident backing of a large proportion of the country. But this doesn’t really tally with reality.
An almost equal number of voters—and likely users—did not vote for the new administration, and may not agree with the platforms’ new policies. However ideologically driven they are, people won’t cut their nose off to spite their face. They would not make these changes if they felt they were bad for business.
Perhaps the most obvious answer, then, is money. Content moderation is incredibly expensive: even with AI algorithms to highlight potentially dangerous or explicit content, human moderators are needed to check that they’ve got things right, and process manual reports on content that isn’t picked up by AI.
The scale of social media platforms means that many thousands of moderators are needed, and these moderators often require extensive mental health support, due to some of the extreme content they have to moderate.
This also brings the logistical challenges of moderation into focus. It’s undoubtedly true that erring on the side of ‘free speech’ and ramping down moderation is easier for social media platforms, given the amount of content they have to sift through.
But to jump straight to ‘near zero’ moderation feels to many like an abdication of responsibility. It’s becoming increasingly clear that social media has a majorly negative impact on people’s mental wellbeing—in large part due to the toxicity and hatred that many people experience on these platforms.
This would not be permissible in any real-life public forum, and particularly one used by children, where careful safeguarding measures would be necessary. Above all else, many of these companies are also the most successful and profitable businesses in the world, and are already developing increasingly complex, capable, and robust AI systems for content creation.
Many people argue that these could be used to improve moderation instead, and reduce the number of false positives. The announcement by Zuckerberg and the efforts of Elon Musk show that they’d rather avoid doing anything to solve this issue.
The rise of social media legislation
That might all be hunky-dorey if every leader around the world acted like Trump. Thankfully for most people, they don’t.
The relaxing of moderation standards is likely to put Facebook and X at loggerheads with the EU and UK, among others, both of whom have called for greater moderation of social media platforms. They’ve also both shown their willingness to ban these platforms in the past if demands were not met, setting the stage for longer blackouts than that one-day TikTok ban.
Indeed, there’s a growing precedent for banning perhaps these platforms’ biggest audience: young people. Both the UK and France have now voted to ban under-16s from all major social media sites other than YouTube. A large part of this comes down to the dangerous ideologies, inappropriate content, and unmoderated abuse that occur with startling frequency, all of which the companies have failed to address.
Even if these platforms aren’t banned (or don’t row back some of these policies), the demographic shift of X over the past few years could start to repeat itself. Once beloved as a source of breaking news, opinions, and celebrity updates, X has seen its users dwindle ever since its acquisition by Elon Musk. Every new scandal, every interjection into foreign and domestic politics, has seen more notable individuals and businesses leave X, either for Instagram or one of its nascent competitors.
Musk’s behaviour and actions in the years since have only grown more erratic, and seen major brands follow celebrities in leaving the platform. Many stopped posting on or left the service for a period in late 2023, when it was revealed that ads were appearing next to Neo-Nazi and other violent or hateful content.
While some returned after action was taken, a growing number have now abandoned the site entirely, moving to competitor Bluesky. Meta’s own X competitor, Threads, saw a brief surge in popularity, but its uptake seems to have slowed—reflecting equally mixed opinions around its owner.
The takeaways for businesses
With these sites growing more toxic and at risk of being banned, then, what’s the best course of action for businesses? Perhaps the first thing to say is that your presence on a social media platform is becoming less and less benign. To many people, simply continuing to post on X in particular will reflect on your business and your brand’s values.
Elon Musk’s actions present him as more and more sympathetic to extreme political causes and ideologies, and not just those in America; in the run-up to SpaceX going public, he tweeted more about UK race and immigration than about his own company. Continuing to be present on these platforms means ignoring this, driving his ad revenues, and contributing to the success of his website.
The line with other platforms falls somewhere between moral judgement, commercial imperatives, and public opinion. Outwardly, Facebook and Instagram are less controversial than X, thanks to the more subdued presence of Mark Zuckerberg.
But his company Meta has a damning privacy record itself, having harvested and commercialised user data for many years, as well as fielding accusations of censoring LGBT+ content, allowing misinformation and hate speech to spread, and approving adverts containing misinformation.
A complete ban on any of these networks still feels unlikely. Like TikTok, most are so embedded in modern society that a partial sale or policy shift is more likely. With the passage of the under-16 social media bans, attention has also shifted away from social media somewhat, and towards the rapid progression of AI, which could pose an even greater danger.
None of this is to say that either the social media companies or businesses are out of the woods. While Trump only has two years left in office (and midterms coming up), the movement he has set in motion is unlikely to quiet down. Tech deregulation has now become a flagship Republican policy, and US government policy dictates the safety of social media for everyone around the world.
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The calculation businesses need to make is where the reputational damage of using these platforms overrides their commercial benefits, particularly with changing audiences. With a platform like X, you are not only seeing entire audience segments leave in droves, but more and more extreme content that your ads could appear next to. The same is increasingly true of Facebook, and X competitor Threads.
A total ban on social media feels unlikely at this point. But the reckoning over the damage caused by social media is well underway, and not something that any business should be blind to. In the absence of government regulation, it falls to individuals and businesses to draw their own line, or risk being caught in the crossfire.